Professional Identity of the Multicultural and Multilingual Individuals in Exile

In this article, I suggest following the professional paths and exile ways of the multilingual and multicultural agents, who worked as translators before exile and changed (or not) their professions in American, British, French, Hungarian and Palestinian exile. This article offers a translation studies perspective on exile research, and its qualitative approach provides a deeper understanding of the experiences of multilingual agents in exile. I analyse the circumstances before and after the exile of (mostly) Jewish literary translators, who, before the exile, worked at the same publishing company, the Paul Zsolnay Verlag, and were forced to flee from interwar Vienna. This case study compares agents in a similar situation before the exile and reveals differences and similarities in their ways of exile, underlining the intersections of their trajectories. Moreover, I show why and how language knowledge and networks established by translators before exile facilitated their emigration and integration. Furthermore, I analyse why the translators left interwar Vienna, which is not always connected to anti-Semitism. Finally, I examine if any of the multilingual refugees had ever come back to Vienna after the end of World War II.